I’ve been kind of quiet lately – here’s a catch-up.

Christmas, and the days before and after, were awesome.

New Year’s was quiet, but also awesome.

Day after, I caught this massive head cold thing that’s going around – sore throat, cough, snot factory, the whole bit. My energy levels are through the floor, but at least I can’t smell dog poop when I’m cleaning up after the pack.

Work went from almost nonexistent to flat-out crazy, which is typical of the “everyone’s back from the holidays, now get to work” mentality that I’ve come to expect after almost 9 years in the same place.

Speaking of long times, today marks the 16th anniversary of the first date where Nighthawk and I considered each other a couple… so that means we’ve been together literally half our lives… that’s 10,000 years in binary.

The puppies are having a hell of a bad time adjusting to us working, and that’s even with us timing our schedules so we’re rarely out of the house for more than 4 hours.

I’ve been doing a lot of knitting, and some drawing, but my drawing is going poorly due to horrible horrible writing. You can draw a funny comic with no words, but if you have poor words, no skill at drawing is going to save you. It’s a work in progress.

So yes, lots of idiocy on the internet and lots of life is odd comics until i get my shit straight.

Today we’re getting a bit of snow (this is not the global warming I signed up for) and possibly some ice tonight, so I’m hoping to hit the mall and save the economy before dinner. We also just got new bookshelves – big ‘uns – so that might be tomorrow’s project, before or after the football game.

The Eagles somehow weaseled their way into the playoffs and I feel obligated to at least watch. I’m not sure it counts as being a bandwagon fan when a) I watch all their games anyway, and b) I’m watching out of morbid curiosity more than a desire to see them win.

Warning: Mushy

On January 10th of 1993, a sixteen year old girl with mouse brown hair and almost no self-esteem accompanied a sixteen year old boy with mouse brown hair and a great sense of humor to the boy’s grandfather’s house for a family birthday party. Later that night, they started holding hands, and decided that they were “dating” as compared to “going on dates”.

(They hated the whole dating scene, particularly its vocabulary. “So are you two seeing each other?” “Well, neither of us is blind…”)

Thirteen years later, they’ve made it through high school graduation, school in different countries, college graduation, weddings, funerals, at least ten different jobs, and thirteen years by each other’s side.

The author wishes to note that she’s not capable of expressing this love by drawing, because her skills are inadequate. Her writing skills are equally too cheap and base to waste on an attempt to capture this love.

Someone must’ve said once that it takes a lot of hard work to be this lucky. It takes a lot of luck to get the opportunity to work this hard.

Tomorrow’s another day – another day like today and the day before and the day before that, when love grows quietly and carefully, flowing through our lives. The tenth isn’t a special day, but just a marker reminding me how special every day is.

Solitude

I tried about a half dozen times tonight to write a post expressing how incredibly weird it is to be home alone overnight. (Nighthawk is at a sleep study. It’s a good thing.) Tonight marks the first night in almost five and a half years that we weren’t in the same building overnight. (There have been nights that one of us was out late, or busy, and didn’t come to bed until almost morning, but never a night that I didn’t go to sleep knowing that he’d be here when I awoke.)

The dog’s been driving me bonkers. She finally stopped looking for him and whining around eleven thirty.

I talked to my cousin on the phone for quite a while. That and the completion of my first game of Civilization IV (I won the space race! whoo!) kept me busy enough not to go absolutely stir-crazy, but still…

Sometimes you take a person for granted when they’re there with you every day. I try to tell him how much I love him every day, and still on days like today I surprise myself by realizing how much he’s a part of my life. I can’t wait for him to come home.